This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to give step by step instructions, so the setup process is understandable and [...]
InnoDB’s gap locks
March 27, 2012 By 15 Comments
One of the most important features of InnoDB is the row level locking. This feature provides better concurrency under heavy write load but needs additional precautions to avoid phantom reads and to get a consistent Statement based replication. To accomplish that, row level locking databases also acquire gap locks. What is a Phantom Read A [...]
How FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK works with Innodb Tables
March 23, 2012 By 20 Comments
Many backup tools including Percona Xtrabackup, MyLVMBackup and others use FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK to temporary make MySQL read only. In many cases the period for which server has to be made read only is very short, just few seconds, yet the impact of FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK can be quite large because [...]
Faster Point In Time Recovery with LVM2 Snaphots and Binary Logs
February 23, 2012 By 3 Comments
LVM snapshots is one powerful way of taking a consistent backup of your MySQL databases – but did you know that you can now restore directly from a snapshot (and binary logs for point in time recovery) in case of that ‘Oops’ moment? Let me show you quickly how. This howto assumes that you already [...]
Percona Server 5.5.18-23.0: Now with Group Commit!
December 19, 2011 By 3 Comments
Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.18-23.0 on December 19th, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories). Based on MySQL 5.5.18, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.18-23.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona ‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can [...]
Setting up XFS on Hardware RAID — the simple edition
December 16, 2011 By 9 Comments
There are about a gazillion FAQs and HOWTOs out there that talk about XFS configuration, RAID IO alignment, and mount point options. I wanted to try to put some of that information together in a condensed and simplified format that will work for the majority of use cases. This is not meant to cover every [...]
kernel_mutex problem. Or double throughput with single variable
December 2, 2011 By 17 Comments
Problem with kernel_mutex in MySQL 5.1 and MySQL 5.5 is known: Bug report. In fact in MySQL 5.6 there are some fixes that suppose to provide a solution, but MySQL 5.6 yet has long way ahead before production, and it is also not clear if the problem is really fixed. Meantime the problem with kernel_mutex [...]
Eventual Consistency in MySQL
November 18, 2011 By 8 Comments
We’re told that foreign key constraints are the best way to enforce logical referential integrity (RI) in SQL, preventing rows from becoming orphaned. But then we learn that the enforcement of foreign keys incurs a significant performance overhead.1,2 MySQL allows us to set FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0 to disable enforcement of RI when the overhead is too high. But [...]
Side load may massively impact your MySQL Performance
November 13, 2011 By 7 Comments
When we’re looking at benchmarks we typically run some stable workload and we run it in isolation – nothing else is happening on the system. This is not however how things happen in real world when we have significant variance in the load and many things can be happening concurrently. It is very typical to [...]
Tutorial Insights for Percona Live, London
August 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment
We have a great line up of Tutorials on Percona Live, London. I hand picked number of them after seeing outstanding speaker Performance in other Places. Let me tell in little bit more details about people we have invited and their talks. Yoshinori Matsunobu Talk on Linux Hardware and Optimizations for MySQL at Oreilly MySQL [...]
